One of the critical components FiveRuns Manage allows you to monitor is the memory usage of your Rails application server. Memory usage is one of the metrics that can provide insight into the availability and responsiveness of your Rails system. These measurements are global to the operating system and independent of your individual Rails application processes.
Which Metrics To Track?
To accurately gauge memory resources, Manage correlates the relative metrics. In the example below, a low percentage of free system memory does not necessarily indicate a resource constraint. The operating system may allocate the bulk of available physical memory to optimize server performance.
Sustained contention for RAM however, can generate swapping to your virtual memory system. This is a good indicator the physical memory is constrained and you are paying a performance penalty by swapping out to disk. Manage tracks both physical and virtual memory statistics like swap in, swap rate and page file usage.
Threshold Triggers
Browsing memory metric graphs is exciting and all, but maybe you’ve got some other things do? No problem. Manage allows you to configure custom alerts using your Rails environment’s baselines and important metrics. The memory example above could be built into a trigger with two simple conditions to provide a more accurate notification of a system problem. When conditions meet your criteria, an email alert is generated with a synopsis of the situation and a link back to the FiveRuns console where you can investigate in more detail.
FiveRuns Manage leverages the full stack of your Rails server metrics, to keep you informed of your application’s status. What are the other important metrics you depend on to keep your production Rails applications online? Let us know and we’ll cover them in future blog posts!
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